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Take This Park and Love It

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IT IS MARCH -- EARLY AUTUMN IN CHILE -- THE day after Douglas Tompkins's 52d birthday, which he spent quietly at his 25,000-acre ranch with friends and employees. He has returned to his "town" home in the southern city of Puerto Montt to the disheartening news that conservative politicians in Valparaiso have denounced him on the floor of the Legislature. As a result, he is spending his morning planning a week of meetings with ministers and politicians and an end-of-the-week news conference.

Between phone calls he pads around the house on Buin Street in a buttoned Scandinavian sweater, khakis and lamb's-wool slippers. Dark eyes sunk in his graying head, he moves his small, athletic body in a hurried shuffle. The house is light and airy, well crafted of blond woods and white paints. (A furniture maker is among his full-time employees.) A 12-foot-tall, Giacometti-like wood sculpture rises in the atrium. The walls are hanged with black-and-white photographs by Irving Penn and elegant color photos of big trees. Out back are a Japanese garden and a greenhouse. Every detail of the renovation of the 100-year-old house was carefully designed by Tompkins. At Esprit de Corp, the international fashion company he started with his then-wife, Susie, he was officially "President and C.E.O." but preferred the title "Image Director."

What has so aroused a handful of Chilean legislators, most of them conservatives, is that over the past five years the multimillionaire (his ex-wife bought him out of Esprit in 1990 for $125 million) ecophilanthropist has become the second largest private landowner in Chile. At a cost of $12 million, he has acquired 670,000 acres of pristine forest, mountains and rivers that cut the nation in two, stretching from the Argentine border to the Pacific Ocean. His intention is to turn the land into a park open to the public -- the largest private park in the world, he says -- and eventually to hand it over to Chile's national park system.

Tompkins, who first visited Chile when he was 17, later came to see the country as a perfect escape from the consumer culture he'd participated in but had grown to despise. It was also a place where he could put into practice his belief in "Deep Ecology," the environmental philosophy that holds, among other things, that the life of a tree is as valuable as that of a human. In the early 90's, he sold his Victorian house in San Francisco, put his money into several foundations that he established and departed for northern Patagonia. But once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur; soon he was buying up all the native forest around, intent on keeping it out of the hands of developers.

Big wall maps display his current holdings, as well as a few tracts he is still negotiating for and a couple that he will never get. By one calculation, Tompkins already owns 78 percent of the remaining old-growth forest in Chile. The park -- which he has named Pumalin, the Spanish diminutive of puma -- would include the country's largest remaining virgin stands of the Chilean redwood, alerce, some of which are 4,000 years old.

Until recently he had proceeded quietly (his critics would say secretively), purchasing parcels big and small without explaining what he was doing, or why. With the Legislature now investigating his activities, his secretiveness, or arrogance, as one legislative critic puts it, has come back to haunt him. "It was never a secret," Tompkins protests. "We just wanted to have all the land locked up before we went public with our plans for the park."

In an oversight he would have cause to regret, Tompkins did not consult local power brokers about his plan. Instead, he did what he had always done before when facing a new challenge, whether it was kayaking a whitewater river or building a company: he simply plunged ahead, making himself an easy target for his critics -- a coalition of politicians, businessmen and the military in southern Chile who don't like that he's taken all that prime native forest out of play. They, in turn, are making the most of their last, best chance to scuttle the park.

While Tompkins has already amassed 670,000 of the 700,000 acres he planned to buy, the remaining 30,000 are critical. They are owned by the Universidad Catholica de Valparaiso, and divide his holdings neatly in half. By accusing Tompkins and his Deep Ecology Foundation of promoting population control in other parts of the world, his congressional foes have persuaded a handful of bishops to speak out against the project. Conservative legislators have raised national security concerns and pressured the university, which gets part of its financing from the Government, not to sell to Tompkins.

To assuage his critics, Tompkins has tried to emphasize that his goal is "ecology, nada mas." But in a country hellbent on development, where trees are being felled by the thousands every day and turned into wood chips to be shipped to Japan to be made into cardboard boxes, preservation is a divisive issue.

"Douglas's biggest problem is that he has become part of a soap opera, fed by envy, one of our great national pastimes," sighs Adriana Hoffman, a Chilean biologist.

TOMPKINS IS A CHARACTER, GRUFF AND charismatic, a man whom employees simultaneously love and hate. It's no surprise to his friends that Tompkins is in the middle of a growing controversy. Tenacious and obsessive, passionate and compulsive, arrogant and caustic are the words most often used to describe him. No one suggests he is ever subtle or modest. "I want to raise the consciousness of the world," he recently told a Chilean newsmagazine. In the mid-1980's, at the height of Esprit's success, he told another interviewer that he was obsessed with two things: "Moving in places where the ordinary human doesn't go" and achieving "world-class status."

His Chilean critics see him as an interloper. While he insists he's "doing a good deed," a growing number of powerful Chileans think he is making them look bad. Imagine if a Japanese mega-millionaire bought one-third of Montana, and then informed the local populace he was doing them a favor. Even if true, it's a hard truth to swallow.

"The country is divided into two and the guilty party is a North American who doesn't even live in this country," warned the conservative weekly Que Pasa. "His objective is, to say the least, dark, covering a vast territory from mountains to sea." The superintendent of Region 10 (one of 13 provinces in Chile), of which Tompkins owns one-fifth, keeps a thick file on the American atop his desk. The army keeps one, too: since his land shares a 44-mile border with Argentina, it sees him as a potential threat to Chile's national security.

A variety of rumors about his motivations don't make his task easier. "They're trying to demonize me and the project," Tompkins complains. The most popular is that he's securing lands for a "second Israel," though he's not Jewish. He has been accused of being a money launderer and a front for a powerful transnational logging company and a variety of new-age spiritual groups. It has been reported that he intends to replace all the cows in the region with buffaloes, and that he is preparing a place to store nuclear waste. "They just don't get it," sighs Tompkins. "Even though preserving natural places may seem ludicrous to most Chileans, I still believe it is the right thing to do."

Perhaps what bothers him most is the evidence that the powerful elite in Chile is simply not interested in preserving the country's native forests. As proof of Chile's pro-development stance, Tompkins points to another American operation, a logging company called Trillium, out of Bellingham, Wash. Trillium has bought nearly as much land as Tompkins has, 625,000 acres on Tierra del Fuego, with no questioning of its motives. "I don't see Trillium's chief executive, David Syre, facing the 'Spanish inquisition' like I am," says Tompkins. "Which seems odd to me. They want to cut down all the trees on their land. I want to preserve mine forever. And I'm the one threatened with being run out of the country."

Despite his sincere desire to save an enormous wilderness of trees, rivers, lakes and mountains, Tompkins doesn't always help his own cause. Even some of his friends think he should make more of an effort to get along, to befriend some of the elite who run Chile. But that is not his style. "Some people here in Chile think he is kind of naive, with all his ranting about how 'the system doesn't work,' " says a Santiago friend. "Here, we know the system doesn't work, that it's ultimately corrupt. That's a given. But talking about it all the time -- like you just figured it out -- makes him seem kind of . . . silly."

Moreover, Chile's view of environmental do-gooders is skewed by the country's incredible, post-Pinochet rush to development. Boasting the best economy in South America, Chile is slated to become the next signatory to the North American Free Trade Association. The new President, Eduardo Frei, the second elected since Pinochet stepped aside in 1989, has traveled around the world since his election, returning home just long enough to report how many millions of investment dollars have been promised by foreign nations. Few in his Government appear to be stepping back and looking at what this boom means for the future of the country's natural resources. Frei has gone so far as to say that no environmental cause will stand in the way of development. "He's an engineer," says Daniel Gonzalez, executive director of the Tompkins foundation that is buying the land, "certainly not an environmentalist."

In his more philosophical moments, Tompkins admits he expected too much and made some mistakes in his approach. "Look, every big project is criticized," he says. "That is part of the process. That is why we must be as transparent as possible. Naturally this makes our work harder, because we need to answer all these rumors. But every day people stop me on the street and thank me. Last week a taxi driver in Santiago recognized me from television and told me it was important to take care of what we have." While Tompkins has people who go into the bush and negotiate with farmers and fishermen, he often goes himself, by horseback or boat; he says he is willing to raise another $20 million to see the park become a reality.

Not everyone in the Government is a critic. Ricardo Lagos, regarded as a strong candidate to become Chile's next president, has announced that he agrees "100 percent" with Tompkins's project. A veteran legislator, Guido Girardi, president of the house committee on the environment, also takes Tompkins's side. "At enormous economic risk Douglas is doing something the Government should be doing -- preserving native forests."

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TOMPKINS'S PREFERENCE IS FOR THE outdoors and the company of a handful of climbing and kayaking buddies. (His first business was the North Face Company, which he started when he was in his 20's.) Since his teens he has made first ascents and descents of dozens of mountains and rivers, from the Sierras to Antarctica. He first fell in love with Chile when he visited there as a teen-age ski bum trying to make the United States ski team; now he owns his own rivers, fjords, mountains and even volcanoes, and spends most of his days piloting one of his small planes or boats between a rustic ranch at Renihue and Puerto Montt. At Renihue there is no telephone or fax; communication is by radio only. Energy comes from an eight-kilowatt electrical plant; the kitchen is wood-fired, the gardens organic. On the property is a one-room schoolhouse he had built for the children of employees and neighbors.

The product of Mayflower-related stock, Tompkins grew up in Greenwich Village and Millbrook, N.Y.; his father owned a Manhattan antiques store. Kicked out of the Pomfret School in Connecticut, he never went to college, moving to California instead to climb and ski. He met Susie Russell in 1963. He was topping trees for a living near Lake Tahoe and she was working as a keno runner in Reno; he was hitchhiking, she picked him up; they were both 20. Married, they moved to San Francisco, where he borrowed $5,000 to start North Face, selling it a few years later for $50,000.

Esprit started out literally on Susie's kitchen table in 1968; by 1986 its worldwide sales had topped $1 billion. With Susie's designs and Doug's marketing savvy, Esprit was among the fastest-growing fashion and life-style companies in the world, a forerunner of such mega-successes as the Gap and the Limited.

Known as Little Utopia and Camp Esprit, the San Francisco-based company was a leader in developing neo-hippie perks, offering employees free language and aerobic and kayaking lessons, and sending them rafting in the foothills of the Himalayas. The company credo was "No Detail Is Small." Happy employees made for fat profits: along the way the boss acquired million-dollar collections of quilts and art, including paintings by Bacon, Picasso, Balthus, Botero and Hopper. As the company grew Tompkins perfected what was dubbed M.B.A. -- Management by Being Absent -- going off for months on climbing and kayaking adventures.

Ultimately he lost his passion for fashion about the same time the company took its first loss. He and Susie weren't getting along, and as they quarreled profits plummeted. In 1990, after several years of wrangling, she and three partners bought him out; the deal gave him $125 million plus 25 percent of Esprit Far East, and plenty of free time to devote to his new passion. Afterward Susie still opened Esprit meetings by urging, "Everybody take a minute and think about Doug, because we wouldn't be here without him." But when I call to ask if she's surprised by her former husband's current predicament, she does not return the call.

ON A COOL NIGHT IN SANTIAGO, TOMPKINS IS preaching to the converted, 50 people gathered at Eco Centro, home to an umbrella group that coordinates Chile's environmental and social groups. Though most in the audience are on his side, they know him primarily from the headlines, and they have plenty of questions.

He responds in what the local media has dubbed his "precarious" Spanish. Dressed in a black cotton turtleneck, khakis and leather slip-ons, he takes questions for two and a half hours, gesturing with his hands when his Spanish fails. He has now done his slide-show song and dance four times for politicos in Valparaiso, and he's fed up with the endless meetings, the bureaucracy. "I've had it up to here," he says, chopping at his neck with his hand.

He has brought his slides tonight, two carousels. The first is made up of dramatic photographs of ugly clear-cuts in North America, from Tennessee, Idaho, Oregon, North Carolina, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. The second starts out with recent pictures of logging in Chile -- lots of roads cut through pristine forests, aerials of stripped hills, vast piles of wood chips. These are followed by elegant photographs taken in and around Pumalin. Tall mountains, snow-covered peaks, deep, forested ravines, tall alerces, blue lakes and fjords, all untouched. It is a powerful display, dripping with exactly the kind of imagery Tompkins knows is his best weapon.

After his talk, in a moonlit courtyard, he elaborates on his vision. "Obviously the whole country can't be preserved, but this is a very special part. It is no good for agriculture or cattle. Sure you could cut the forests and sell the trees, but once cut the land would be good for nothing. It is one of the last virgin reservoirs of the world and I intend to see it preserved."

It has been eight years since Tompkins started to extricate himself from the business world and devote himself to ecology. One concern of critics and loyalists alike is that the current hassles will turn Tompkins off, and he'll walk away. After all, he fled the fashion business when it got "boring."

Is it fair to wonder if he might similarly tire of the endless Chilean bureaucracy and walk away from Pumalin? He insists not. "It's funny, because I thought they would be glad to have me here," he says. "But to many Chileans I guess what I'm trying to do must seem incomprehensible. Ultimately it doesn't matter what they think. I'm not going anywhere. This park will take the rest of my life."

PERHAPS. BUT IT'S ALSO TRUE THAT THE park might not take the rest of his year. In July, the Chilean Government announced that it would purchase the 30,000-acre tract from Universidad Catholica de Valparaiso. Some weeks later, it reversed itself, instead appointing a commission to study the probable impact of the park. Tompkins, who fears the worst, says he will indeed abandon his dream if the Government buys the land. He would continue to seek sanctuary status for his land, but would keep his 670,000 acres private, off-limits to the public.

"The Government jumped right in there to muck everything up," he complains. "These far-right guys somehow talked the president into taking the decision to buy this piece of land. The reason they put forward -- national security -- is entirely stupid. We went to the minister of defense, and he admitted we presented no security problem."

Officially, the Government says it will make a park out of the land. If that's the case, contends Daniel Gonzalez of Tompkins's Fondacion de Educacion, Sciencia y Ecologia, trying to put an optimistic spin on the news, "they've saved us $2 million." But Tompkins doesn't believe they'll ever follow through. "They don't necessarily want to develop this piece of land or turn it into a park. All they want to do is break the initiative. They want to sour the atmosphere for other kinds of investment like this, on principle. Preservation is a bad word to them. This is not personal, it is ideological."

Belisario Velasco, the Government's chief spokesman on the issue, has called Tompkins paranoid and has denied that the purchase was intended to stop him.

Tompkins has spent the last several weeks on the telephone with local journalists, meeting any public officials he can, arguing that the Government has no good reason to spend taxpayer dollars on something he is prepared to buy -- and then give back to the people of Chile. But for now he's not feeling very optimistic.

"People tell us that once the president makes a decision he'll never back off. But we're holding the line. We're going to do whatever we can to make it hurt a little bit, without getting myself killed."

A version of this article appears in print on September 3, 1995, on Page 6006024 of the National edition with the headline: Take This Park and Love It. Today's Paper|Subscribe